Badgeville looks beyond gamification, launches a behavior platform

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

It has bundled its services into what it calls a behavior platform, building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

The idea is to provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers. Kris Duggan, the CEO of Badgeville, said the company has evolved beyond just gamification to social, reputation and analytics, which can all work together to influence and manage behavior. Said Duggan:

We think there’s a new category called behavior management. Individual things such as analytics, social, gamification, private label social networks. It’s all scratching this issue. We focus on how to turn it all into a platform that allows any type of company, anyone with an audience, to use these techniques for user behavior.

Deloitte Digital, PayPal and eBay’s X.Commerce, CA Technologies, Samsung, and Rogers Communications are among the dozens of Fortune 1000 companies who have signed on to use Badgeville’s behavior platform. Some are implementing specific pieces while others are deploying the full suite.

The new behavior platform will potentially pit Badgeville against some enterprise social networking tools like Chatter, Yammer and others. But Duggan said it’s also working to integrate with those services so the behavior platform can incorporate actions on these channels into its larger reputation and rank system.

Badgeville is now up to 50 employees, and it counts more than 100 customers, who pay a few thousand dollars per month to use its products. The company, which launched a year ago, raised $12 million in July. I think this is a logical step for Badgeville, which is not simply playing in the gamification space. It’s about working on loyalty, behavior and engagement, and gamification is just one tool for that. By combining game mechanics with other tools, it can try to be a go-to behavior engine for enterprise clients. I still have to see how this plays out, but it makes sense. And it shows that gamification, with the right collection of other behavior tools, can be useful to corporations.